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Poland may seek extradition of Ukrainian Nazi WW2 veteran Hunka from Canada

deleted 3y ago
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mydriasis 3y ago
> “In view of the scandalous events in the Canadian parliament, which involved honouring, in the presence of President Zelensky, a member of the criminal Nazi SS Galizien formation, I have taken steps towards the possible extradition of this man to Poland,” announced education minister Przemysław Czarnek. > “Such crimes constitute grounds for applying to Canada for his extradition,” added Czarnek in the letter. Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. Drag him home and try him.
- 1over137 3y ago
  >Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. Indeed; but in their defence, members of parliament did not know, at the time, that this guy was a Nazi.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    Oh well that makes it okay/s. It's really comforting that Members of Parliament are that intellectually bankrupt.
    - 1over137 3y ago
      Do you expect each MP to individually vet the guests that other MPs have invited to the house? The fault here lies in the pathetic vetting done by the MP that invited him (the Speaker no less). And he'll likely resign or be fired shortly.
      - starburst 3y ago
        They did introduce him as fighting against the Russian in WWII... It's easy to put all the blame on a single scapegoat, this is the results of a lot of incompetent people. Shameful moment.
        mantas 3y ago
        And that division did fight against Russians. It's a shame westerners love to paint everything with a broad brush and don't look into details during WW2 in territories between Nazis and Soviets.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        Who else fought against Russians in WW2? Did they think the guy is Finnish? Do you actually believe the parliament of a first world country with all the staff and process that it has did not know about it? Why did Trudeau call it Russian propaganda when confronted about it, even if we assume that he magically didn't know anything about the guest?
        mantas 3y ago
        Poland? Resistance in Baltic states and Ukraine?
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        I guess, but resistance in Ukraine and the Baltic states was mostly post war.
        mantas 3y ago
        The post-war resistance had close ties to local nazi-aligned units though. Both to get guns/ammo and pool together the interested people.
      - boeingUH60 3y ago
  - version_five 3y ago
    Of note, Canada's deputy prime minister has a masters degree from Harvard in slavic studies and wrote a book about Russia. They knew what army the guy fought for, it's unlikely that she or anyone else who knew about history could really not have known if they'd thought about it at all.
    - 1over137 3y ago
      Who is the 'they' you refer to? You are incorrectly assuming that there is some big consultation about every guest invited into the House. There is not. Indeed Freeland would have noticed this if she was involved with the vetting, but she's the deputy PM, she's not doing minutia like checking guest backgrounds.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Probably true, but as deputy PM and as a person also intimately acquainted with this issue she should have been very involved. She is of Canadian-Ukrainian background, lived there for some years post-Soviet, fluent in both Russian and Ukrainian, and has extensive networks there. It's unclear to me in general why she hasn't been more prominent on this file in general (Ukrainian-Canadian relations during the war). Except that there have been controversies about some of her family's Ukrainian nationalist past, and maybe they're keeping her out of the limelight on this for that reason. Or Trudeau sees her as a threat, and is doing to her what Chretien did to Paul Martin (keep them close but under wraps), I dunno. In any case, she should have been involved, and would have known better. You hope. There was a time a couple years ago when she was the clear "natural" successor to Trudeau. Since then her star seems to have faded, and he doesn't seem to know when to get off the stage, either.
        1over137 3y ago
        >In any case, she should have been involved... The deputy prime minister should be involved in vetting other people's guests to the House of Commons? Personally? You don't think she has more important things to do? Vetting of guests should be done, and should be done much better than it was, but it's a job for (competent) staffers, not cabinet personally.
  - mydriasis 3y ago
    I don't care about parliament, it's iterated below that it's a simple slip up. I agree with the poster who said a simple apology would suffice on their end. It's the man himself. That's what really matters. Too many of these monsters got away in the ratlines and recruitment programs after the war. He should be drug and tried like the rest who were responsible for the atrocities of the time.
  - t0suj4 3y ago
    There is an implication that they clap for whomever they think they are supposed to clap for in your statement. I have doubts that is a good thing.
- miroljub 3y ago
  > Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. But he fought against the Russians. His past is here irrelevant. North American democracies have never had issues with Nazis, as long as they can help them beat the Russia. They even got the highest possible positions, like for example, the chief of NASA that landed on the moon before the Soviets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
  - mantas 3y ago
    Eh. In those parts of europe Soviets/Russians was the evil. First, Soviets/Russians came in 1939. Atrocities started (Katyn, Rainiai, mass deportations to Gulag, pick your favourite). Then Nazis came as a new management and stopped those atrocities just to start their own. Few years later, Soviets rolled back in to resume what they started few years ago. And then there's another can of worms of how Poland acted to it's neighbours in 1920.
    - mydriasis 3y ago
      Not alone. 25% of Belarus was exterminated by the Nazis.
      - mantas 3y ago
        Big portion of that blood is on soviets hands. Both for stabbing Poland and Baltic states in the back. And then running pro-soviet underground resistance that did little to stop nazis but was very successful in triggering well-known nazi response. As well as running their own atrocities on locals that took guns from nazis to defend from pro-soviet resistance.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you explain WWII in this framing. There was a very easy way to help Nazis beat Russia in WWII, and uh, we did the opposite thing.
    - 3y ago
- mantas 3y ago
  I'm not very familiar with this particular person. But in those parts of europe it was common to join Nazi-adjoint (SS or otherwise) formations to defend against inevitable comeback of Soviets. After experiencing Soviets first-hand in 1939-41, many people weren't exactly looking forward for them coming back.
  - clan 3y ago
    I do not subscribe to the idea the regular german army was entirely clean. And all war is dirty! Furthermore you are absolutely correct that Soviet rule was not something you'd wish for. Waffen SS was however a truly heinous organisation. If you consider it common to join the SS I would state that it also paints a rather extreme picture of those persons. I think it is very dangerous to apologise for SS "just because they killed Soviets".
    - mantas 3y ago
      The main Waffen SS and ethnic units in eastern europe were two different things. You're thinking about SS units formed in Nazi Gerrmany-proper. Ethnic units, while technically a part of Waffen SS, were quite a different story. At least up here in between Nazis and Soviuets. Recruitment was mostly about defending from Soviets. In most cases leaders were well-known figures from interwar era. And usually those leaders did a lot to make sure their units ain't used for stuff you typically think of when you hear „Waffen SS“. At the end of the war, those units were the starting point for post-WW2 anti-soviet resistance. Both people and guns/ammo.
      - Pulcinella 3y ago
        "While technically he was a literal Nazi in the literal SS..." Buddy, think about what you are writing. You don't need to defend these people. What they did, what they were a part of, is in fact bad and they should feel bad.
        mantas 3y ago
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- gwbas1c 3y ago
  Take a minute to think of what living in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied countries were like. There's a point in Meip's (person who hid Anne Frank and her family) memoir where she relates a story of Otto Frank discussing a staff member who joined the Nazi party. (Remember, the Franks hid in the building where Otto Frank ran a business.) Otto pointed out that this man probably joined for the social connections, and called the man a "good man." He (Otto Frank) was well aware that people had to adapt to the "new normal" of Nazi rule, and that often meant joining and cooperating with them. Later in Meip's memoir, she implies that the business where the Franks were hiding were selling foodstuffs to the Nazi army. Everyone had to do what they could to survive Nazi occupation. Don't forget that Otto Frank ultimately is one of the reasons why we know so much about the Holocaust. He spent a good deal of his post-WWII life raising awareness of it. https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Remembered-Helped-Family-ebook/dp/B004QWZ5WQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=meip+gies&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Remembered-Helped-Family-e...
  - blast 3y ago
    I think you should reconsider this unfortunate comparison. Volunteering for the SS and exterminating civilians is nothing like "selling foodstuffs" or just "doing what you could to survive".
  - t0suj4 3y ago
    If he "had" to fight for Germans he would be in Wehrmacht. Not in Waffen SS that was the tip of the spear of Nazi ideology.
version_five 3y ago
I'm in no way defending him or the government's actions here. I want to add though that Canada did have a commission in 1986 look into this person's unit (Galacia Division) did not find evidence implicating them in war crimes. If there is evidence of course I'm all in favor of extraditing and prosecuting him and others The report also found that Canada was home to several thousand ex-Nazis who couldn’t be directly implicated in war crimes given the available evidence. This was the inquiry’s verdict on the Galicia Division, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit in which Yaroslav Hunka – the man applauded Friday in the House of Commons – was a veteran. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-has-long-been-slammed-as-a-haven-for-ex-nazis-like-yaroslav-hunka https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-has-lo...
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  Atrocities section on wikipedia is pretty thick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)#Atrocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...
  - mantas 3y ago
    From your link: > the Galician Division has not specifically been found guilty of any war crimes by any war tribunal or commission
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      It's still a nasty stink to have people whose ideological leanings went that way, standing up in parliament and getting recognition. And it does a disservice to the Ukrainian people. Because it emphasizes the ugly side of Ukrainian nationalism instead of the legitimate side of their cause, and gives Putin and Lavrov an ideological weapon at home and abroad in BRICs countries, etc. The line from the west should be clear: we will help defend you. Your cause is just. But the far right imagery has to end, they need to put their foot down about it. Was looking at photos of the liberation of (what's left of) Andriivka the other day and right there in a western news media article was an unfurled flag of a far right militia with a quasi-Nazi insignia. That's f'd up. From my understanding of friends who grew up in the Canadian Ukrainian community, there have always been two sides to it, with "progressive" or "left" branches and nationalist and right-wing branches. I remember a friend telling me his parents sent him to a Ukrainian summer camps where they practiced shooting rifles to "fight against Russians" and stuff. In Canada. It's a messed up history.
rsynnott 3y ago
> On September 22, 2023, following an address to the Canadian parliament by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Rota introduced and recognized Yaroslav Hunka in the parliamentary galleries. He identified Hunka as a "war hero" who fought for the First Ukrainian Division; Hunka was applauded by members of all parties. Subsequent media reports identified Hunka as having been a member of the 14th SS Division in World War II. Two days later Rota issued an apology saying that more information had come to light, causing him to regret having invited Hunka. Wow, this is basically a storyline from The Thick of It or similar. (I have the vague memory of more or less exactly this playing out in some sitcom, possibly The Thick of It or Yes Minister.)
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belltaco 3y ago
A similar incident happened with the Canadian PM in India. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-india-atwal-controversy-1.4546502 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-india-atwal-controv...
irrational 3y ago
I'm somewhat surprised the nazi agreed to be showed off in Parliment. Maybe he doesn't think what he did back then was wrong? Maybe he thinks too much time has passed? Maybe he is old and senile and wasn't able to fully think about it at all? Maybe he thought it was funny and figured he'd go out with a bang?
- icepat 3y ago
  Many who fought the Soviets in the SS did not think what they were doing was wrong. Read up on the Estonian Waffen SS devision. They have a peculiar history. SS Foreign regiments were controversial at the time, and some were declared as non-culpable in the Nuremberg Trails as they were classified as "conscripts". Obviously this man is different, as he volunteered in a regiment that was itself classified as criminal, however it's possible he was expecting similar treatment.
  - enterprise_cog 3y ago
    They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong exterminating Jewish people from their lands either. Let’s not try and obfuscate that fact by stating they were fighting the Soviets only.
    - icepat 3y ago
      I never said anything remotely related to that they were "just" fighting them. I just pointed out why some units were not charged, and why he may have expected the same. The fact of the matter was many _were_ fighting the Soviets, and the historical context here is vital. All of it, including the holocaust aspects of it.
  - endianswap 3y ago
    This was in Ukraine, though, where 1.5 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
- lr1970 3y ago
  He is old like in his 90s, in mental decline consistent with his age, and has little to loose because extradition proceedings take long time. On the flip side, he was given celebrity reception in the Parliament and he got his 15 minutes of fame.
nmeofthestate 3y ago
Given that the existence and past of this man has been public knowledge for decades, rather than having been revealed in the last week, it's hard to take this call seriously. The Polish government minister should probably log off Twitter.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I'm no expert on Polish affairs, but there's been some recent turn in events in Poland that seems to be whipping up the internal nationalism vs. Ukraine (around grain exports and stuff) and it's such a huge sea change from a year ago when it was all brotherly support and solidarity. Unclear what the nationalist ruling party in Poland is trying to accomplish with this. It all just seems ridiculous to me. I think about my wife's maternal grandmother (actually both sides of her family really) whose family was from that area (Galicia) and emigrated dirt poor to Canada pre-WWI. She was able to flip between speaking something-like-Polish and something-like-Ukrainian on a whim without even seeing it as two different languages, really. Like most of Europe (my own father was born in Alsace during the war, also an ethnic border zone), the lines on the map and the official ethno-nationalisms hide a much more complicated diversity, and I always mistrust the people who have made their political careers out of boosting some tribalism vs another marketing a simplistic vision of language-ethnicity-nation.
  - throwexp 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - r721 3y ago
    Also not an expert, but I suspect this is the reason: >Parliamentary elections will be held in Poland on 15 October 2023 to elect members of the Sejm and Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_elec...
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Your grandma being "race blind" or whatever does not change the actual atrocities that happened in Galicia. And yeah how dare the polish government not like an ally praising the member of an SS division known for massacring poles and being anti pole. Silly nationalist nonsense!
aftbit 3y ago
I'm not a Nazi sympathizer by any means, but this guy is 98 years old. There is no possible way that it would be ethical to extradite him to Poland.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Why should he be treated any differently than Demjanjuk?
- infamouscow 3y ago
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  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't do this here.
- bboozzoo 3y ago
  Geee, wondering what the victims would say about this. Oh wait..
  - aftbit 3y ago
    The purpose of justice isn't to make the victims or their families feel better. That's just revenge.
- ignorethefacts 3y ago
  The vile, seething hatred deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people overcome all rationality. See how many even on this website seek vicious token vengeance against an old man who was not guilty of any crimes they themselves implicitly support in their own countries foreign policies and actions. There is so much historical context lost when the fat virtue signalers project their first-world peace-time morals onto a people who were subject to war, famine, hatred, degradation and humiliation. Imagine being down-voted for showing sympathy for an old man. What a disgusting pit of snakes we find ourselves in.
stainablesteel 3y ago
poland joins the cold war between canada and india, whose next to shit on canada? i think this could be really entertaining in the future
throwexp 3y ago
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ChumpGPT 3y ago
From the wiki page >Although the Waffen-SS as a whole was declared to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials, the Galician Division has not specifically been found guilty of any war crimes by any war tribunal or commission. However, numerous accusations of impropriety have been leveled at the division There are questions that have never been answered properly. From what I understand OUN/UPA,Galician Division did not have the machinery in place to kill 100k + Poles. Their tactics and their primary purpose was to protect and defend Ukrainian lives from Russian communists. Further more most of Western Ukrainians are a mix of Polish/Ukrainian peoples. We need to be mindful that there is much Russian propaganda concerning many of these kinds of events as it was advantageous for the the Communists to try and seed lies into the historical record. -50% Polish....
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Surely just being part of a Waffen SS division should be enough to disqualify someone from getting praised in a parliament especially in a country that lost tons of its citizens fighting the SS? I guess Nazis are fine, and not problematic, as long as they don't have literal war crime charges against them. I'm sure that will own the Russians lol.
  - ChumpGPT 3y ago
    Well, he was probably only 15-16 when they took him. It was actually quite interesting how they recruited. They would enter a village after blocking anyone from leaving, gather up all the young men, and bring them to a central location for a quick medical and physiological eval. If you were fit and passed, they basically loaded you onto wagons and you were gone. They also took a lot of children who were blond and blued eyed back to Germany for the Hitler youth. I read an account where a man gave a baby he was holding to a young girl on the street who he didn't even know to take to his wife because they were leading him off. The Germans has a way to make sure everyone behaved, they would hang a few dozen older guys or possible just kill an entire village and burn it to the ground. People in the West have a hard time understand what was actually going on in many of these countries at the time. Here is an interesting caption from a magazine. The German war on the civilian population in Ukraine was ruthless. The entire world heard about the total destruction of the Czech village of Lidice and the killing of all the men in its population of 400 on June 10, 1942. The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane razed on June 10, 1944 is also well known. But the world never heard about the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy which the Germans burned to the ground on September 23, 1942 and killed all its 2,892 population of men, women and children. There were about 459 villages in Ukraine completely destroyed with all or part of their population by the German Army with 97 in Volhynia Province, 32 in Zhitomir province, 21 in Chernihiv province, 17 in Kiev province and elsewhere. There were at least 27 Ukrainian villages in which every man, woman and child was killed and the village completely destroyed by the Germans. (Ukrainska RSR u Velykyi Vitchyznianiy Viyni, vol.3, p. 150). At least 160 Nazi concentration camps, some holding tens of thousands of prisoners, were established in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians were also sent to Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland. The janowska (Yanivska) Camp in Lviv was especially notorious because the Commandant, SS officer Gustav Wilhaus, used to sit on his balcony and with his automatic rifle use the inmates in the yard as target practice, even shooting children. The camp also had an orchestra and played a tune titled "The Tango of Death" specially composed for it. The orchestra was executed when the Germans closed the camp during their retreat. (Wytwycky, p. 59) According to the official records of Germany there were 4,192,000 German war dead. If Germany itself, according to World Book Encyclopedia, lost only 2,196,000 military dead and 1,858,000 missing or a total of 4,054,000 why were Ukraine's losses so huge? There are several possible explanations. It is known that the Germans intentionally starved Ukrainian cities; that Ukrainian prisoners of war in concentration camps were starved to death; that disease was rampant and was not top be treated on Hitler's orders; and that because about 2,000,000 houses and apartments were burned at least 10,000,000 Ukrainians were left homeless in the war exposing them to freezing in the winter. Wilhelm Keitel gave an order to the German Army in the East: "for the killing of a single German soldier we should retaliate by the execution of 50-100 persons" (Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, p. 166). The death penalty was applied to Ukrainian hostages: up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by guerillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941 announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941 again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This should serve as a warning to the population." The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid or merely information or directions to the UPA or Ukrainian guerillas. If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with its contents and passed it on." (History Teaches a Lesson). It is obvious that early in the war Germany had a policy of annihilation of Ukrainians because it planned to establish a German colonial population in the Lebensraum of Ukraine. The USSR also sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives in its "cannon fodder" military procedures. Soldiers were marched across minefields by foot to clear them by their deaths. When the USSR retreated in June 1941 it executed over 19,000 political prisoners in Lviv and other west Ukrainian cities. Stalin was not interested in preserving Ukrainian lives. But does all this account for Ukraine's population loss of 7.5 to 11 million? Unfortunately the Government of Ukraine since independence in 1991 has not released any official figures for Ukraine's population loss in World War II. One astounding theory is that Stalin used the war as a pretext to destroy Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens. This theory was proposed by an Englishman of Russian origin, Nikolai Tolstoy, in his book Stalin's Secret War. Nikita Khrushchev in his secret speech to the 20th Congress said Stalin wanted to exile all the Ukrainians to Siberia so this theory is not completely far-fetched. In June 1944 a Soviet decree, signed by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Lavrenti Beria, recommended that all Ukrainians be resettled in Siberia. One expert on Soviet history suggested that Stalin destroyed up to one million people of the USSR every year during the war so the statistic of 20 million total lost probably includes Stalin's victims.
dirtyid 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  We've banned this account for using HN primarily (in fact practically exclusively) for political and nationalistic battle, and ignoring our many requests to stop. We've cut you a ton of slack for years. I bent over backwards to try to clarify the intended use of the site, on many occasions. But this sort of chortling flamebait makes it clear that you don't want to use HN as intended. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dirtyid_ta 3y ago
    Look Dang, your forum, your rules. You do great job moderating and been patient/understanding/fair over the years so I'm not going to appeal just respond. I've been throttle to 5 replies for years so I end up 50/50 random topic posting and PRC geopolitics discussion. I either run of comments in a few minutes of browsing/commenting shooting the shit on casual threads if interest or exhaust ability to respond in any serious discussion chain on PRC which I like to discuss in depth. Of which I bow out when attitude turns unproductive. Like how often do my comments get flagged? Without metrics you have, my feeling is if you look response / score to my comment, up/down votes tend to cancel out, aka it's controversial, aka it's middle ground and not flamebaity. At least I hardly get flagged. Some people like my comment, some don't. But the people who don't like it, really don't for obvious reasons. That's life. As for this particular comment being flamebait, politely disagree. I'm a Canadian commenting on an embarassing Canadian geopolitical shitshow that is directly related to recent Indian-Canadian drama with overlapping concerns for extradition relating to Canada's structural issue of harbouring diasphora with problematic backgrounds. Yeah I shared a quippy article from Beaverton, a Canadian satire site commenting on the situation because it's funny. Joked about Canadian establishment wanting this problem to go away. Which they do. It's crass humor but also relevant to topic about CANADIAN politics, which no one has ever accused me of being nationalist for. Like of all comments to ban my account on for nationalist battle, this is the most ridiculous/unrelated.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

> “In view of the scandalous events in the Canadian parliament, which involved honouring, in the presence of President Zelensky, a member of the criminal Nazi SS Galizien formation, I have taken steps towards the possible extradition of this man to Poland,” announced education minister Przemysław Czarnek. > “Such crimes constitute grounds for applying to Canada for his extradition,” added Czarnek in the letter. Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. Drag him home and try him.

1over137 3y ago
>Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. Indeed; but in their defence, members of parliament did not know, at the time, that this guy was a Nazi.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Oh well that makes it okay/s. It's really comforting that Members of Parliament are that intellectually bankrupt.
  - 1over137 3y ago
    Do you expect each MP to individually vet the guests that other MPs have invited to the house? The fault here lies in the pathetic vetting done by the MP that invited him (the Speaker no less). And he'll likely resign or be fired shortly.
    - starburst 3y ago
      They did introduce him as fighting against the Russian in WWII... It's easy to put all the blame on a single scapegoat, this is the results of a lot of incompetent people. Shameful moment.
      - mantas 3y ago
        And that division did fight against Russians. It's a shame westerners love to paint everything with a broad brush and don't look into details during WW2 in territories between Nazis and Soviets.
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        Who else fought against Russians in WW2? Did they think the guy is Finnish? Do you actually believe the parliament of a first world country with all the staff and process that it has did not know about it? Why did Trudeau call it Russian propaganda when confronted about it, even if we assume that he magically didn't know anything about the guest?
        mantas 3y ago
        Poland? Resistance in Baltic states and Ukraine?
        mardifoufs 3y ago
        I guess, but resistance in Ukraine and the Baltic states was mostly post war.
        mantas 3y ago
        The post-war resistance had close ties to local nazi-aligned units though. Both to get guns/ammo and pool together the interested people.
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
- version_five 3y ago
  Of note, Canada's deputy prime minister has a masters degree from Harvard in slavic studies and wrote a book about Russia. They knew what army the guy fought for, it's unlikely that she or anyone else who knew about history could really not have known if they'd thought about it at all.
  - 1over137 3y ago
    Who is the 'they' you refer to? You are incorrectly assuming that there is some big consultation about every guest invited into the House. There is not. Indeed Freeland would have noticed this if she was involved with the vetting, but she's the deputy PM, she's not doing minutia like checking guest backgrounds.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Probably true, but as deputy PM and as a person also intimately acquainted with this issue she should have been very involved. She is of Canadian-Ukrainian background, lived there for some years post-Soviet, fluent in both Russian and Ukrainian, and has extensive networks there. It's unclear to me in general why she hasn't been more prominent on this file in general (Ukrainian-Canadian relations during the war). Except that there have been controversies about some of her family's Ukrainian nationalist past, and maybe they're keeping her out of the limelight on this for that reason. Or Trudeau sees her as a threat, and is doing to her what Chretien did to Paul Martin (keep them close but under wraps), I dunno. In any case, she should have been involved, and would have known better. You hope. There was a time a couple years ago when she was the clear "natural" successor to Trudeau. Since then her star seems to have faded, and he doesn't seem to know when to get off the stage, either.
      - 1over137 3y ago
        >In any case, she should have been involved... The deputy prime minister should be involved in vetting other people's guests to the House of Commons? Personally? You don't think she has more important things to do? Vetting of guests should be done, and should be done much better than it was, but it's a job for (competent) staffers, not cabinet personally.
- mydriasis 3y ago
  I don't care about parliament, it's iterated below that it's a simple slip up. I agree with the poster who said a simple apology would suffice on their end. It's the man himself. That's what really matters. Too many of these monsters got away in the ratlines and recruitment programs after the war. He should be drug and tried like the rest who were responsible for the atrocities of the time.
- t0suj4 3y ago
  There is an implication that they clap for whomever they think they are supposed to clap for in your statement. I have doubts that is a good thing.
miroljub 3y ago
> Actual Nazis getting standing ovations! Unbelievable. But he fought against the Russians. His past is here irrelevant. North American democracies have never had issues with Nazis, as long as they can help them beat the Russia. They even got the highest possible positions, like for example, the chief of NASA that landed on the moon before the Soviets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
- mantas 3y ago
  Eh. In those parts of europe Soviets/Russians was the evil. First, Soviets/Russians came in 1939. Atrocities started (Katyn, Rainiai, mass deportations to Gulag, pick your favourite). Then Nazis came as a new management and stopped those atrocities just to start their own. Few years later, Soviets rolled back in to resume what they started few years ago. And then there's another can of worms of how Poland acted to it's neighbours in 1920.
  - mydriasis 3y ago
    Not alone. 25% of Belarus was exterminated by the Nazis.
    - mantas 3y ago
      Big portion of that blood is on soviets hands. Both for stabbing Poland and Baltic states in the back. And then running pro-soviet underground resistance that did little to stop nazis but was very successful in triggering well-known nazi response. As well as running their own atrocities on locals that took guns from nazis to defend from pro-soviet resistance.
- justrealist 3y ago
  I'm not sure how you explain WWII in this framing. There was a very easy way to help Nazis beat Russia in WWII, and uh, we did the opposite thing.
  - 3y ago
mantas 3y ago
I'm not very familiar with this particular person. But in those parts of europe it was common to join Nazi-adjoint (SS or otherwise) formations to defend against inevitable comeback of Soviets. After experiencing Soviets first-hand in 1939-41, many people weren't exactly looking forward for them coming back.
- clan 3y ago
  I do not subscribe to the idea the regular german army was entirely clean. And all war is dirty! Furthermore you are absolutely correct that Soviet rule was not something you'd wish for. Waffen SS was however a truly heinous organisation. If you consider it common to join the SS I would state that it also paints a rather extreme picture of those persons. I think it is very dangerous to apologise for SS "just because they killed Soviets".
  - mantas 3y ago
    The main Waffen SS and ethnic units in eastern europe were two different things. You're thinking about SS units formed in Nazi Gerrmany-proper. Ethnic units, while technically a part of Waffen SS, were quite a different story. At least up here in between Nazis and Soviuets. Recruitment was mostly about defending from Soviets. In most cases leaders were well-known figures from interwar era. And usually those leaders did a lot to make sure their units ain't used for stuff you typically think of when you hear „Waffen SS“. At the end of the war, those units were the starting point for post-WW2 anti-soviet resistance. Both people and guns/ammo.
    - Pulcinella 3y ago
      "While technically he was a literal Nazi in the literal SS..." Buddy, think about what you are writing. You don't need to defend these people. What they did, what they were a part of, is in fact bad and they should feel bad.
      - mantas 3y ago
        [flagged]
gwbas1c 3y ago
Take a minute to think of what living in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied countries were like. There's a point in Meip's (person who hid Anne Frank and her family) memoir where she relates a story of Otto Frank discussing a staff member who joined the Nazi party. (Remember, the Franks hid in the building where Otto Frank ran a business.) Otto pointed out that this man probably joined for the social connections, and called the man a "good man." He (Otto Frank) was well aware that people had to adapt to the "new normal" of Nazi rule, and that often meant joining and cooperating with them. Later in Meip's memoir, she implies that the business where the Franks were hiding were selling foodstuffs to the Nazi army. Everyone had to do what they could to survive Nazi occupation. Don't forget that Otto Frank ultimately is one of the reasons why we know so much about the Holocaust. He spent a good deal of his post-WWII life raising awareness of it. https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Remembered-Helped-Family-ebook/dp/B004QWZ5WQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=meip+gies&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Frank-Remembered-Helped-Family-e...
- blast 3y ago
  I think you should reconsider this unfortunate comparison. Volunteering for the SS and exterminating civilians is nothing like "selling foodstuffs" or just "doing what you could to survive".
- t0suj4 3y ago
  If he "had" to fight for Germans he would be in Wehrmacht. Not in Waffen SS that was the tip of the spear of Nazi ideology.

version_five 3y ago

I'm in no way defending him or the government's actions here. I want to add though that Canada did have a commission in 1986 look into this person's unit (Galacia Division) did not find evidence implicating them in war crimes. If there is evidence of course I'm all in favor of extraditing and prosecuting him and others The report also found that Canada was home to several thousand ex-Nazis who couldn’t be directly implicated in war crimes given the available evidence. This was the inquiry’s verdict on the Galicia Division, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS unit in which Yaroslav Hunka – the man applauded Friday in the House of Commons – was a veteran. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-has-long-been-slammed-as-a-haven-for-ex-nazis-like-yaroslav-hunka https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-canada-has-lo...

CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
Atrocities section on wikipedia is pretty thick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)#Atrocities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...
- mantas 3y ago
  From your link: > the Galician Division has not specifically been found guilty of any war crimes by any war tribunal or commission
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    It's still a nasty stink to have people whose ideological leanings went that way, standing up in parliament and getting recognition. And it does a disservice to the Ukrainian people. Because it emphasizes the ugly side of Ukrainian nationalism instead of the legitimate side of their cause, and gives Putin and Lavrov an ideological weapon at home and abroad in BRICs countries, etc. The line from the west should be clear: we will help defend you. Your cause is just. But the far right imagery has to end, they need to put their foot down about it. Was looking at photos of the liberation of (what's left of) Andriivka the other day and right there in a western news media article was an unfurled flag of a far right militia with a quasi-Nazi insignia. That's f'd up. From my understanding of friends who grew up in the Canadian Ukrainian community, there have always been two sides to it, with "progressive" or "left" branches and nationalist and right-wing branches. I remember a friend telling me his parents sent him to a Ukrainian summer camps where they practiced shooting rifles to "fight against Russians" and stuff. In Canada. It's a messed up history.

rsynnott 3y ago

> On September 22, 2023, following an address to the Canadian parliament by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Rota introduced and recognized Yaroslav Hunka in the parliamentary galleries. He identified Hunka as a "war hero" who fought for the First Ukrainian Division; Hunka was applauded by members of all parties. Subsequent media reports identified Hunka as having been a member of the 14th SS Division in World War II. Two days later Rota issued an apology saying that more information had come to light, causing him to regret having invited Hunka. Wow, this is basically a storyline from The Thick of It or similar. (I have the vague memory of more or less exactly this playing out in some sitcom, possibly The Thick of It or Yes Minister.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

belltaco 3y ago

A similar incident happened with the Canadian PM in India. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-india-atwal-controversy-1.4546502 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-india-atwal-controv...

irrational 3y ago

I'm somewhat surprised the nazi agreed to be showed off in Parliment. Maybe he doesn't think what he did back then was wrong? Maybe he thinks too much time has passed? Maybe he is old and senile and wasn't able to fully think about it at all? Maybe he thought it was funny and figured he'd go out with a bang?

icepat 3y ago
Many who fought the Soviets in the SS did not think what they were doing was wrong. Read up on the Estonian Waffen SS devision. They have a peculiar history. SS Foreign regiments were controversial at the time, and some were declared as non-culpable in the Nuremberg Trails as they were classified as "conscripts". Obviously this man is different, as he volunteered in a regiment that was itself classified as criminal, however it's possible he was expecting similar treatment.
- enterprise_cog 3y ago
  They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong exterminating Jewish people from their lands either. Let’s not try and obfuscate that fact by stating they were fighting the Soviets only.
  - icepat 3y ago
    I never said anything remotely related to that they were "just" fighting them. I just pointed out why some units were not charged, and why he may have expected the same. The fact of the matter was many _were_ fighting the Soviets, and the historical context here is vital. All of it, including the holocaust aspects of it.
- endianswap 3y ago
  This was in Ukraine, though, where 1.5 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
lr1970 3y ago
He is old like in his 90s, in mental decline consistent with his age, and has little to loose because extradition proceedings take long time. On the flip side, he was given celebrity reception in the Parliament and he got his 15 minutes of fame.

nmeofthestate 3y ago

Given that the existence and past of this man has been public knowledge for decades, rather than having been revealed in the last week, it's hard to take this call seriously. The Polish government minister should probably log off Twitter.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I'm no expert on Polish affairs, but there's been some recent turn in events in Poland that seems to be whipping up the internal nationalism vs. Ukraine (around grain exports and stuff) and it's such a huge sea change from a year ago when it was all brotherly support and solidarity. Unclear what the nationalist ruling party in Poland is trying to accomplish with this. It all just seems ridiculous to me. I think about my wife's maternal grandmother (actually both sides of her family really) whose family was from that area (Galicia) and emigrated dirt poor to Canada pre-WWI. She was able to flip between speaking something-like-Polish and something-like-Ukrainian on a whim without even seeing it as two different languages, really. Like most of Europe (my own father was born in Alsace during the war, also an ethnic border zone), the lines on the map and the official ethno-nationalisms hide a much more complicated diversity, and I always mistrust the people who have made their political careers out of boosting some tribalism vs another marketing a simplistic vision of language-ethnicity-nation.
- throwexp 3y ago
  [flagged]
- r721 3y ago
  Also not an expert, but I suspect this is the reason: >Parliamentary elections will be held in Poland on 15 October 2023 to elect members of the Sejm and Senate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Polish_parliamentary_elec...
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Your grandma being "race blind" or whatever does not change the actual atrocities that happened in Galicia. And yeah how dare the polish government not like an ally praising the member of an SS division known for massacring poles and being anti pole. Silly nationalist nonsense!

aftbit 3y ago

I'm not a Nazi sympathizer by any means, but this guy is 98 years old. There is no possible way that it would be ethical to extradite him to Poland.

selimthegrim 3y ago
Why should he be treated any differently than Demjanjuk?
infamouscow 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't do this here.
bboozzoo 3y ago
Geee, wondering what the victims would say about this. Oh wait..
- aftbit 3y ago
  The purpose of justice isn't to make the victims or their families feel better. That's just revenge.
ignorethefacts 3y ago
The vile, seething hatred deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of people overcome all rationality. See how many even on this website seek vicious token vengeance against an old man who was not guilty of any crimes they themselves implicitly support in their own countries foreign policies and actions. There is so much historical context lost when the fat virtue signalers project their first-world peace-time morals onto a people who were subject to war, famine, hatred, degradation and humiliation. Imagine being down-voted for showing sympathy for an old man. What a disgusting pit of snakes we find ourselves in.

stainablesteel 3y ago

poland joins the cold war between canada and india, whose next to shit on canada? i think this could be really entertaining in the future

throwexp 3y ago

[flagged]

ChumpGPT 3y ago

From the wiki page >Although the Waffen-SS as a whole was declared to be a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials, the Galician Division has not specifically been found guilty of any war crimes by any war tribunal or commission. However, numerous accusations of impropriety have been leveled at the division There are questions that have never been answered properly. From what I understand OUN/UPA,Galician Division did not have the machinery in place to kill 100k + Poles. Their tactics and their primary purpose was to protect and defend Ukrainian lives from Russian communists. Further more most of Western Ukrainians are a mix of Polish/Ukrainian peoples. We need to be mindful that there is much Russian propaganda concerning many of these kinds of events as it was advantageous for the the Communists to try and seed lies into the historical record. -50% Polish....

mardifoufs 3y ago
Surely just being part of a Waffen SS division should be enough to disqualify someone from getting praised in a parliament especially in a country that lost tons of its citizens fighting the SS? I guess Nazis are fine, and not problematic, as long as they don't have literal war crime charges against them. I'm sure that will own the Russians lol.
- ChumpGPT 3y ago
  Well, he was probably only 15-16 when they took him. It was actually quite interesting how they recruited. They would enter a village after blocking anyone from leaving, gather up all the young men, and bring them to a central location for a quick medical and physiological eval. If you were fit and passed, they basically loaded you onto wagons and you were gone. They also took a lot of children who were blond and blued eyed back to Germany for the Hitler youth. I read an account where a man gave a baby he was holding to a young girl on the street who he didn't even know to take to his wife because they were leading him off. The Germans has a way to make sure everyone behaved, they would hang a few dozen older guys or possible just kill an entire village and burn it to the ground. People in the West have a hard time understand what was actually going on in many of these countries at the time. Here is an interesting caption from a magazine. The German war on the civilian population in Ukraine was ruthless. The entire world heard about the total destruction of the Czech village of Lidice and the killing of all the men in its population of 400 on June 10, 1942. The French village of Oradour-sur-Glane razed on June 10, 1944 is also well known. But the world never heard about the Ukrainian village of Kortelisy which the Germans burned to the ground on September 23, 1942 and killed all its 2,892 population of men, women and children. There were about 459 villages in Ukraine completely destroyed with all or part of their population by the German Army with 97 in Volhynia Province, 32 in Zhitomir province, 21 in Chernihiv province, 17 in Kiev province and elsewhere. There were at least 27 Ukrainian villages in which every man, woman and child was killed and the village completely destroyed by the Germans. (Ukrainska RSR u Velykyi Vitchyznianiy Viyni, vol.3, p. 150). At least 160 Nazi concentration camps, some holding tens of thousands of prisoners, were established in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians were also sent to Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland. The janowska (Yanivska) Camp in Lviv was especially notorious because the Commandant, SS officer Gustav Wilhaus, used to sit on his balcony and with his automatic rifle use the inmates in the yard as target practice, even shooting children. The camp also had an orchestra and played a tune titled "The Tango of Death" specially composed for it. The orchestra was executed when the Germans closed the camp during their retreat. (Wytwycky, p. 59) According to the official records of Germany there were 4,192,000 German war dead. If Germany itself, according to World Book Encyclopedia, lost only 2,196,000 military dead and 1,858,000 missing or a total of 4,054,000 why were Ukraine's losses so huge? There are several possible explanations. It is known that the Germans intentionally starved Ukrainian cities; that Ukrainian prisoners of war in concentration camps were starved to death; that disease was rampant and was not top be treated on Hitler's orders; and that because about 2,000,000 houses and apartments were burned at least 10,000,000 Ukrainians were left homeless in the war exposing them to freezing in the winter. Wilhelm Keitel gave an order to the German Army in the East: "for the killing of a single German soldier we should retaliate by the execution of 50-100 persons" (Kamenetsky, Secret Nazi Plans, p. 166). The death penalty was applied to Ukrainian hostages: up to 200 innocent Ukrainians were executed for one German attacked by guerillas. In spite of this a total of 460,000 German soldiers and officers were killed by partisans in Ukraine during the War. Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941 announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941 again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This should serve as a warning to the population." The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid or merely information or directions to the UPA or Ukrainian guerillas. If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with its contents and passed it on." (History Teaches a Lesson). It is obvious that early in the war Germany had a policy of annihilation of Ukrainians because it planned to establish a German colonial population in the Lebensraum of Ukraine. The USSR also sacrificed countless Ukrainian lives in its "cannon fodder" military procedures. Soldiers were marched across minefields by foot to clear them by their deaths. When the USSR retreated in June 1941 it executed over 19,000 political prisoners in Lviv and other west Ukrainian cities. Stalin was not interested in preserving Ukrainian lives. But does all this account for Ukraine's population loss of 7.5 to 11 million? Unfortunately the Government of Ukraine since independence in 1991 has not released any official figures for Ukraine's population loss in World War II. One astounding theory is that Stalin used the war as a pretext to destroy Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens. This theory was proposed by an Englishman of Russian origin, Nikolai Tolstoy, in his book Stalin's Secret War. Nikita Khrushchev in his secret speech to the 20th Congress said Stalin wanted to exile all the Ukrainians to Siberia so this theory is not completely far-fetched. In June 1944 a Soviet decree, signed by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Lavrenti Beria, recommended that all Ukrainians be resettled in Siberia. One expert on Soviet history suggested that Stalin destroyed up to one million people of the USSR every year during the war so the statistic of 20 million total lost probably includes Stalin's victims.

dirtyid 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (in fact practically exclusively) for political and nationalistic battle, and ignoring our many requests to stop. We've cut you a ton of slack for years. I bent over backwards to try to clarify the intended use of the site, on many occasions. But this sort of chortling flamebait makes it clear that you don't want to use HN as intended. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dirtyid_ta 3y ago
  Look Dang, your forum, your rules. You do great job moderating and been patient/understanding/fair over the years so I'm not going to appeal just respond. I've been throttle to 5 replies for years so I end up 50/50 random topic posting and PRC geopolitics discussion. I either run of comments in a few minutes of browsing/commenting shooting the shit on casual threads if interest or exhaust ability to respond in any serious discussion chain on PRC which I like to discuss in depth. Of which I bow out when attitude turns unproductive. Like how often do my comments get flagged? Without metrics you have, my feeling is if you look response / score to my comment, up/down votes tend to cancel out, aka it's controversial, aka it's middle ground and not flamebaity. At least I hardly get flagged. Some people like my comment, some don't. But the people who don't like it, really don't for obvious reasons. That's life. As for this particular comment being flamebait, politely disagree. I'm a Canadian commenting on an embarassing Canadian geopolitical shitshow that is directly related to recent Indian-Canadian drama with overlapping concerns for extradition relating to Canada's structural issue of harbouring diasphora with problematic backgrounds. Yeah I shared a quippy article from Beaverton, a Canadian satire site commenting on the situation because it's funny. Joked about Canadian establishment wanting this problem to go away. Which they do. It's crass humor but also relevant to topic about CANADIAN politics, which no one has ever accused me of being nationalist for. Like of all comments to ban my account on for nationalist battle, this is the most ridiculous/unrelated.